Posted by Marvin from cache03.netway.at (195.96.10.36)on June 16, 1998 at 10:10:15:
Uh, according to the latest news, the Unreal engine
is gaining more importance than expected
(I myself still classified Unreal as vaporware not
very long ago..... what a mistake (not my first one,
though)). Seems to become a big selling/buying argument
for Voodoo2 cards...
Seems like the beginning of a dark age for Rendition...
Ok, I recklessly extended my lunch break (you know,
I am my own boss :), and tested the beginning
of the first level in Unreal....
SKing is right about two important things:
o) it's too dark
o) textures are still screwed up, but only if you
select DetailTexture=True...(perhaps more problems
with a 4MB card)
About darkness: when implementing the special blending
modes I luckily noticed that one blending mode did
change the look (brightness,etc..) of the whole game totally:
For some texture operations, a blending mode of
srccolor*dstcolor+dstcolor*srccolor is used. When implenting
this blend in RRedline, suddenly all was very dark... I have
to check this mode, since it affects the whole picture, not
only some textures!
Well, I replaced this blending mode for testing purposes with
a blend of srccolor*dstcolor+dstcolor, and suddenly
everything is much too bright, ie. not gloomy anymore
(of course), but you can see every detail (including
all reflections and the transparent water!), and can play
without any problem (actually, when you get used to
it, it looks quite 'normal', just a different game,
sort of...). I played in this mode to verify
the textures, etc... and I have to say the following:
(note: performance should not be affected by changing
this blending mode!)
o) at the beginning of level 1, as far as I did come
looking around (without any fight so far), i.e. in the
first approx. 8 rooms and corridors...., everything seems
to work quite fine! Apart from the different color scheme,
I noticed only some W-buffering inaccuracies (which are to be
expected due to a more clever W-value handling of
Voodoo...) - perhaps we can reduce these error
with different WShiftValues further....
Everything else was ok! (Though in the armoury, where
the floor is reflective (100%), the view is extremely
confusing....:)
o) about speed: I am used to much choppiness and I am
not a die-hard(?) gamer...
On my P133/32MB, with only some tweaks
(DetailTextures=FALSE,SlowVideoBuffer=True,...)
the speed varies, of course, drastically depending
on the game location...
I get frame timings between 20ms and 200ms, in average
locations about 70/80ms(12-15FPS) and in more open views into
the larger rooms about 120ms(8FPS)....200ms was absolutely the
worst case - these lousy 5 FPS are not much of course...
In some corners I even get 20ms = 50FPS!!! :):):)
This would make a nice headline, don't you think: ;-)
"UNREAL WITH 50FPS ON MY P133, thanks to my V2200!!!"
Please don't quote this! :)
All in all I was surprised that it is choppy but
still playable (for me)....
In fact, i played Unreal on my P133 in 640x480 for quite
a while now!
Don't know whether it would be much faster in 512x..,
I still can't get this mode to work (refresh rate
problems with my (very old) monitor, never had the
time to fix this)
--------
So all in all I am very optimistic...
And suddenly I've got some appetite on this game....
My plans for the near future:
o) look into this strange blending mode (for what does
Unreal use this mode?, it seems to be central to the
whole look of the game...). Perhaps the darkness is
still an error of the wrapper (though it basically
looks right, just a bit too dark), or it's simply a
problem of Rendition vs. Gl?de blending calculations,....
There's yet another possible source for this error: the
fog color & mode may influence overall brightness
of a game, too (noticed this drastically in Barrage,
where everything was visible only when turning on
(still wrong) fog caculations)
o) Try some optimizations (since the game uses
paletted textures, handling of texture/palette reload
should have important influence on speed...).
Buffer clearing may be very important here, too
(as far as I can tell from the log, the W-buffer is cleared more
than once per frame?)
o) Look deeper into the game where some of the
problems SKing describes should lurk for me....:)
(to be continued)